ABSTRACT
Much of the early research associated with Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education (RECE) was concerned about prescriptions for early childhood curriculum, such as Developmentally Appropriate Practice, that implicitly reflected white, middle-class norms and assumptions about what should be emphasized in early childhood programs. From its formative years in the late 1980s, RECE's founders have worked closely with early childhood teachers, families, and young children. In the United States, many of the researchers who helped shape RECE were using ethnographic methods and had been part of sessions at the American Anthropological Association meetings around the theme of "Through Children's Eyes/In Children's Voices". It remains an exciting vision of embodied reconceptualization that is hard to do, making RECE's existence as a connector of dispersed communities of practice, groups of people working together to achieve shared goals, as necessary today as it was back in the day.
